Good sunny morning to all of the parents and children.
It is sooo beautiful up here in North Vancouver....but I am looking down into a foggy Stanley Park area. Are you shrouded in the fog? It looks rather spooky down there...it looks like Kitsilano is getting ready for Halloween!!

Speaking of Halloween, I must say that we had a wonderful Friday all looking so wonderful in our costumes. The children handled the excitement and energy with such a calmness. I was very impressed by everyone's behaviour and participation. We started off our Friday with our Halloween Assembly...we paraded around the gym and we not only showed off our costumes but got to see everyone's costumes as well. After we joined our buddies in doing an monsters reading/writing craftivity. Then we got to go and join Lisa and burn off some of our energy with our dancing. In dance Lisa talked about creating our own dances. We worked in little groups and drew our dance moves into our dance journals and then used rhythm words, and movement words to create a vision of our own unique dance. Both Lisa and I were so impressed by how quickly they understood the concepts. The production that will be held at the end of December will be very amazing! I cant wait to see it all put together. After dance we enjoyed some yummy treats that some of the children brought in...thank you and then we did some very scarey monster paintings inspired by the story "Where the wild things are". We will be finishing them on Monday and then doing some writing to go along with our art work.  We ended our day with a Scooby Doo movie that the children all enjoyed. Some thought it might be scarey, but realized that it wasnt and it was quite enjoyable for them. Who doesnt love Scooby Doo?? As you can see we had a great Friday!!! Funday Friday is what we call that day.

As a result on Monday we will keep it fairly calm. I still have some Halloween activities planned, such as decorating some cookies that I have just finished baking, doing some Halloween writing, some Halloween math and then ending the day with a sponge bob Halloween dvd with our friends from Division 10 (Ms. Jung;s class) We will munch on our cookies and enjoy the movie. Then they will be all yours to get all dressed up and out for trick or treating!!

Which is my next seque! There will be a lot of wonderful candies and treats that your child will be collecting. But as you know I do a lot of discussion around healthy and unhealthy eating. Our goal is to eat mostly healthy foods, with the understanding that on special occasions (such as Halloween) that they will be consuming more treats than usual. What I am asking is that all the Halloween candy be kept and enjoyed at home under the supervision of their parents. I know from past experiences that children who have their chocolates and candies at school during recess and lunch have a much harder time settling in to concentrate on the days activities and that often if given the choice of their chocolate or their apple, they will pick their chocolate. So I do ask that they do not bring their treats to school...thank you for your support. Also, what may help the lowering of consumption is donating the treats to the classroom box. I will be setting up a box that will be for all extra candy, c hocolates etc and I will be taking it to the homeless shelter in North Vancouver. I have taken them boxes of treats before and it was greatly appreciated. I will tell the children this as well on Monday, The whole school is invited to participate in donating their treats! Isnt the fun of Halloween, just the dressing up and trick or treating??? hahahahhah!!!

With that,
enjoy the numerous pictures that I have taken!
Have a great Sunday...and I hope you are not too fogged in!
teri

Yoga like warm up with Lisa.

listening to lisa with such concentration

working on creating their pathways in teams of three

This is Lori and she is our techno poetologist ...she is showing the children how to add their pictures to their poem on the ipads and how to use some of the different functions and tools.

These are the children who went to the cross country meet so worked on their project with Ms. Whitelaw's support.

This is Deana Michel the VSB Aboriginal Education Enhancement Worker. Deana works with Bayview on Thursdays. I have invited Deana to visit our class about once a month to support the children in their learning and understanding about the FIrst Nations. Today Deana came in and told us what an Elders role was. An elder is our knowledge keepers. She told us that next week that we would be having the opportunity to meet an Elder, Shane Point. He will be coming in and sharing some stories with the children as that is one thing that the Elders do. They pass down stories from generation to generation and help us paint a picture in our mind of how the land was before and how it has changed over time. This will be very interesting for the children.

Our haunted house banners...art on one side, poem on the other side.

arent they spooky??? more inside!

Stick lady and dracula!

Our very creative class!

Arent they wonderful???

My fellow stick friends!

The art worker that we did of our idea of what a potlatch might look like.

Good Morning everyone!

I hope everyone has had a lovely weekend thus far. The sun came out for a little while yesterday...did you notice it? Did you get out and play? I bought my pumpkins yesterday...very good prices at the Walmart here. Big pumpkins for less than three dollars each. If you are in the North Vancouver neighbourhood, you might want to stop in!!

First off, I would love to thank all the parents who came and chatted with either myself or Ms. Craig during our Parent Teacher conferences. Both Ms. Craig and I feel so happy and blessed to have such a wonderful group of children who are supported by such special, involved, caring parents. Again I would like to reinforce the importance of communication. If there is a problem, speak up. If you have questions, ask. We work together as a team to help your children feel safe, cared for and respected while they learn valuable life lessons in class.

This last week felt like a short week what with two early dismissals and a a professional day on Friday, but in those few days we were busy beavers.

On Monday, we worked on learning the life cycle of the corn. We read about it, talked about it, wrote about it and finally used plastercine to create our own life cycle  of the corn plant. 

On Wednesday the grade two group made some corn bread using corn flour. We all tried it and agreed it was quite delicious.

On Thursday, about seven of our children went to the cross country meet. Congratulations to all the children who practiced and participated. It takes a lot of courage and determination to go to a meet with sooo many children from all over.

Meanwhile, the rest of the children went to the library to work on our poem using the ipads and the book creator app. Over the last few weeks Lori, our techo-poet-ology expert has been coming in once a week to discuss, brainstorm and inspire the children prior to their actual writing. We chose the theme of potlatches.A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. We incorporated the talk of harvesting food (corn, tomatoes, pumpkins) into our conversation and then during our discussion we practiced dancing to a first nations drum beat, looked at first nations art, and practiced drawing some of the shapes of the animals. Thus leading us to our own writing. We started our writing and drawings in class and on Thursday was our opportunity to use the ipad to write it all down. Ms. Jung's few children joined our group to help us figure out the program. The children were amazing! Those that missed this day due to cross country running, will have a catch up day. As you will see by the pictures coming up the children had a lot of fun using the technology!

Finally:

Important Halloween information

This Friday, October 28th Bayview will be celebrating Halloween a few days early. We will start by having a Halloween assembly in the morning. The children are invited to wear their costumes to school as we will be having a Halloween parade during the assembly. It is a lot of fun seeing what everyone has created for their costume. As it is still a full day at Bayview the children must have something that they can change into after the morning parade. Something that is non restrictive, binding, or annoying to them. We will be participating in our dance with Lisa after recess, and then doing some art in the afternoon, so it is important that they can move freely as well as not worry about getting too dirty!!!

We will not be having a party on this day as I think by the evening when many of the children will be attending the Halloween Howl, that they will have enough excitement to last them for a while. On Monday , October 31st (true Halloween) we will do some Halloween games and activities and writing and at the end of the day, watch a little Halloween video. We will keep it pretty calm!

With that, 

enjoy the pictures and your Sunday as well. I will see you all on Monday!!

teri

Nina brings in her pet mice for show and tell! This is Coffee.

Most everyone touched the little mouse!

Our beautiful scare crows with our scary crows!

The life cycle of the corn.

The next pictures are of the children working on their ipads. They have their poem beside them and are now learning how to type it into their ipad.

There are four faces that you might now recognize...and these are the children who helped our children, Ryan, Boden, Jasper and Bella from Ms. Jung's class.

After our ipad work we made some dangly spiders...getting ready for Halloween!

A big wet soggy hello to everyone!!!
As everyone knows already we had an impromptu early dismissal on Friday. The power went off at about 130 and about 230 most of the children had left with parents or caregivers. The funny thing was, no one really wanted to leave. We were sooo busy painting our scarecrows and making our crows, that the children didnt notice that we didnt have any power. In fact most of the time we work with out all of our lights anyway, so to have the power go out, was really a minor issue for the children. But, thank you for those who did respond as quickly as they did...this definitely tests out how quickly people will respond in emergency situations!

Speaking of early dismissals there are two coming up next week. Next Tuesday and Wednesday the children will be dismissed at 155 (as the first parent teacher interviews begin at 200) so we will be gathering the children up a few minutes earlier than normal and saying good bye so that the interviews can begin immediately. All parent teacher interviews are for only the parents and the teacher. For this meeting the children will not be coming. Usually we have them attend the second set of interviews. All meetings will be for 20 minutes. Please knock loudly on the door when it is your turn as we want to give everyone a fair chance at having their 20 minutes. Thank you so much!

Also as a reminder, there is a Professional Day on Friday.October 21st. Children do not come to school on this day.

We have had a great few days together. I am attaching many photographs for you to look at. I try to get pictures of everyone, but sometimes if the children have left for hot lunch or the bathrooms, sometimes I miss them. I try to make sure that over the weeks I get a shot of each child at least once. I hope you enjoy the pictures. I feel just by looking at their faces, you get an idea of the joy that goes on in the classroom!!
With that, have a great rest of the day and I will see everyone tomorrow!
teri

The corn feast. We all tried the corn that my parents brought from grand forks. You can see for your self by the pictures coming up how much they enjoyed their corn on the cob! This is part of our harvest unit. We are also looking at the parts of the corn, and on Monday will be looking at the  Life Cycle of the corn plant.

Today Nikoo came in to talk about mulching and why we mulch. So we collected some leaves and added them to our garden boxes to protect the soil and the plants. Then we also planted our winter crop....kale. Later we went inside and learned about the life cycle of the Kale. In the spring, we should begin to see growth and likely will be able to start harvesting our Kale plants. Yum!

Nikoo demonstrates how to plant a kale without harming the plant.

Every day, right after lunch we do our DEAR...which means drop everything and read. I partner up the children and they read their home reading books to each other. It is amazing how helpful they are to each other, as well as how they really are interested in listening to their buddy read! This is one of the reasons why it is important to return their home reading daily. Reading with their classmates is always exciting for them!